On The Bike Shed, host Chris Toomey and guests discuss their development experience and challenges with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by German Velasco for a conversation
that fully lives up to the name of the show with plenty of opinions and
impressively deep dives on topics that folks outside the world of programming
would never think could warrant this much discussion.

How much duplication should we have? Is there such a thing as too DRY? Is there
ever a need for code comments, really? Lest you worry that Chris & German spend
the whole episode just volleying opinions, have no fear: the episode is balanced
out with plenty of pointed suggestions and useful anecdotes to make sure
everyone will enjoy it.

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Matt Sumner, development director in our Boston Studio to discuss Matt's crypto adventures, design sprint experiences, a new ecosystem for him with Scala & GraphQL.

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Daniel Colson, developer in our New York studio and current maintainer of all things FactoryBot. Chris & Daniel discuss Daniel's work as maintainer of one of thoughtbot's most popular open source projects and some of the parallels to thoughtbot's consulting work. They then discuss a bit more on the specifics of FactoryBot and what's in store for upcoming versions.

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Ruby Hero Avdi Grimm. They discuss Avdi's history of guiding the Ruby and broader programming communities, his thoughts about where we're at with object-oriented programming, and where he's looking to next for our industry.

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Eebs Kobeissi, a developer in our Boston studio, for a discussion encompassing the front end, back end, and everything in between. They start by discussing Eebs' recent work with both Elm & TypeScript, and the relative merits of these two strongly typed languages for the front end. From there they move on to a discussion around the different communities and rates of change in each.

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by former thoughtbotter Ben Orenstein. Ben & team are currently feverishly working towards launching Tuple.app, an app for remote pair programming. The conversation covers the unique technical challenges inherent to building this sort of app (WebRTC & firewalls, oh my), as well as a discussion around the merits and value of pair programming. To round out the conversation, Ben checks in on whether Chris is still "nerding out hard on Vim".

Chris is joined by Eric Bailey, thoughtbot designer and champion for all things accessibility on the web. Chris & Eric chat about how Eric approaches accessibility and works to include it throughout the design process, design systems, functional CSS, CSS in JS, and more.

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by thoughtbot CTO Joe Ferris. Chris & Joe start by talking about all things data. More and more we're building applications that need to manage medium to large data sets, combining data from multiple sources, and our approaches and frameworks need to evolve to match these needs. Joe provides the low down on how this can shape the way we build our applications.

As part of the discussion around data they dig into the idea of event logs, most notably discussing Apache Kafka and it's unique approach to capturing state by storing an immutable event log, and the resulting architecture that falls out of this.

Lastly they chat about the Scala language both in relation to data and streaming applications, but also more generally as an example of an approachable yet powerful strongly typed language.

Matt Sumner returns to chat with Chris about their recent adventures. They discuss Matt's ongoing work building an open source Ethereum implementation in Elixir, Chris's recent trip to speak at GraphQL Summit, and React Hooks.

On this episode of the Bike Shed Chris is joined by Derek Prior, former thoughtbotter and previous host of this very podcast. Derek has recently moved on from thoughtbot to try out a new role as an engineering manager at GitHub.